Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential run brought with it an unwelcome reminder of the added obstacles women candidates often encounter. From “Iron my Shirt” banners to debates regarding whether Clinton was overly emotional or an ice princess, we were faced with gender stereotypes that have often plagued women in leadership roles. Her campaign strategy attempted to counteract preconceived notions of female candidates by accentuating Clinton's toughness and strength, even to the point of trying to “outmale” her opponents (e.g., see Lawrence and Rose 2010). The result was a prime example of the double bind in which women who appear strong are then seen as unlikeable (Jamieson 1995). However, Clinton reached new levels of popularity from 2008 to 2012 as secretary of state and a presumed presidential contender in 2016. This leads us to question whether she was able to successfully navigate the double bind—perhaps through additional offsetting information or her ability to competently handle the masculine position of secretary of state—or if public attitudes have evolved to a point where gender no longer matters in the assessment of political candidates.

The earliest political behavior researchers documented the powerful effects of group attachments and other socioeconomic factors on vote choice and partisan identification in the 1940s and 1950s (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). Yet, research interest in the group-based origins of political behavior has waxed and waned in the intervening decades (Huddy 2003). The existence of both an African-American and female frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 provides an opportunity to consider the contemporary electoral consequences of in-group loyalties and out-group antipathies. We take advantage of select survey and poll data collected during the 2008 Democratic primaries to evaluate the power of gender and race as both positive and negative influences on voter calculus in an election in which the two major candidates were differentiated less by their issue positions and beliefs than by their skin color and gender.

This contribution to the Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism uses expert and election surveys to explore the extent to which the feminist or traditional gender ideology of parties of the right relates to their economic and liberal/authoritarian ideology. We show that although parties of the left generally espouse more feminist ideologies than parties of the right, there are a significant number of rightist parties in Western Europe that combine laissez-faire economic values with liberal feminist ideals. That said, there is more homogeneity among parties of the populist radical right than rightist parties more generally. We find that despite some variation in their gender ideology, parties of the populist radical right overwhelmingly—with the exception of one party in the Netherlands—continue to adopt traditional or antifeminist gender ideologies. In terms of attracting women voters, we find that rightist parties who adopt a feminist gender ideology are able to attract more women voters than other parties of the right. We detect several examples of center-right parties that include feminist elements in their gender ideologies and are able to win over larger proportions of women voters than rightist parties that fail to adopt feminist positions.

It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are associated with greater legislative representation for women than single member systems. However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is also hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features are endogenous. In this study, we draw upon an experiment conducted during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections to isolate the effects of different PR electoral systems. Participants in the experiment were given the opportunity to vote for real EP candidates in three different electoral systems: closed list, open list, and open list with panachage and cumulation. Because voter preferences can be held constant across the three different votes, we can evaluate the extent to which female candidates were more or less advantaged by the electoral system itself. We find that voters, regardless of their gender, support female candidates, and that this support is stronger under open electoral rules.

Gender inequality in the Muslim world has become the object of high drama on the international scene. Ghostlike images of women wrapped in burqas and begging in the streets of Afghan cities swept television screens in the United States following 9/11. The number of articles on Muslim women in English newspapers has increased exponentially in the last few years. Although the popular press and the media continue to emphasize seclusion and subordination in their description of Muslim women, scholars have written extensively and persuasively to debunk the myth of the Muslim woman as a victim, passively suffering the subordination imposed on her. Starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present, a rich literature has argued that as elsewhere in the world, Muslim women have not only resisted subordination but have actively shaped their own destiny (e.g., work by Leila Ahmed [1992], Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt [2008, 2009], Elizabeth Fernea [1998], Nikki Keddie [2002, 2007, 2008], and Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji [forthcoming]).

Personalization has cultivated a bad reputation in politics. Initially, scholarship on the personalization of politics focused on what was often called “candidate-centered” voting: the idea that citizens would vote based on a candidate's personality. Many scholars viewed this evaluative approach as irrational and heralded the value of issue stances over charisma (see Fenno 1978; Popkin 1991). Focusing on the personal, it seems, was problematic. Another iteration of the personalization in politics was also problematic and focused on the use of the “personal frame” in news coverage of women candidates. Such news coverage focused more on women's personalities and personal lives as compared to men's (e.g., Bystrom 1999; Devitt 1999). On its surface, such coverage does not appear detrimental. However, this framing would often emphasize women's roles as mothers and wives and use that framing to question women's experience, fitness for office, and whether they could juggle domestic and political responsibilities (Braden 1996). Personalization in both iterations elicited a sense of triviality: voters’ focus on persona was deemed as a trivial way to form an opinion, and women candidates were trivialized via a focus on their personal, not political, lives.

This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS).

At the U.S. 2012 general election, six minority women were newly elected to the House of Representatives, a net increase from 21 to 23, and a rise from 23% to 27% as a proportion of all women in the House (CAWP 2010, 2012). Among this group was Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI 2nd District), the first Hindu American to serve in Congress. Despite generally positive coverage, her local paper also framed Gabbard's identity as an “underdog … on the margins of popular respectability.” In Utah, Mormon Mia Love ran the first viable black female Republican campaign, securing 47% of the vote in the state's overwhelmingly white 4th District. Love was frequently framed positively as a “historic candidate” and was invited to speak at the GOP convention that year. Despite this, her self-portrayal as a product of the American dream—linking her second-generation Haitian identity to her partisan politics—drew sharp criticism. Local campaign coverage even interrogated the legality of her family history with headlines such as “Love's Immigrant Story may be True, but Some Questions Linger.”

“What does queer theory teach us about x?” ask Berlant and Warner (1995). “As difficult as it would be to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames” (p. 348). This challenge comes from an early essay published to circumvent queer theory's appropriation. Its power “to wrench frames” is what I am posing to intersectional research, not only to reflect on what intersectionality has allowed feminists to accomplish but also to identify some existing shortcomings in the scope and domain of its employment. Because there is little disputing intersectionality's theoretical contribution to feminist research in the past decades—one scholar calls it “the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies . . . has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771)—it is important for us to take stock of the sorts of political problems that intersectional scholarship has addressed and the ones to which it has often been inattentive.

As Sapiro (1981) pointed out many years ago, recognizing that women's interests are interesting is the vital first step in establishing the significance of women's political representation (or the lack thereof)—both in the “real” world and in the scholarly world. Indeed, the assumption that women's interests exist, that women have political interests that can be defined and measured, is central to much of the subsequent research and discussion of women in politics. It is central to our own research on the relationship between women's descriptive and substantive representation (e.g., Reingold 2000; Swers 2002), and it is central to this symposium. Yet we come together in this symposium not simply because we share this assumption, but more tellingly because we all grapple with this assumption. Defining and measuring women's political interests pose a number of very difficult questions or dilemmas, which we elaborate in the following. We highlight these challenges not to dismiss such endeavors as futile or necessarily misguided. Rather, we argue that the very uncertainty surrounding women's interests is what makes them so interesting.

While the impact of an attorney's sex has been examined with respect to trial court processes (e.g., jury decision making), no one has previously studied its effects on appellate court decision making. In this article, we argue that the application of gender schemas by some justices results in a devaluing of the arguments made by women litigators. Our findings suggest that women orally arguing attorneys are less likely to receive a favorable vote by a justice than are the male counsel they oppose and that conservative justices are more likely than their liberal counterparts to vote against litigants represented by female counsel at oral argument. This suggests that the ideology of elites influences whether they apply gender schemas in a negative fashion. We also find that justices are more likely to side with female lawyers in women's issues cases, indicating that the justices' perceptions of female lawyer expertise are enhanced in those cases. These findings persist even after controlling for multiple factors, including attorney expertise, the sex of the justice, amicus participation, party capability, and judicial ideology.

Disability is the new gender. I make this claim with trepidation and a sense of irony. Certainly, disability studies today is like women's studies was in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist scholars had to convince colleagues in “mainstream” political science that gender was something worth attending to, that it was a serious enterprise, and that it should be part of the mainstream. The fields of history and English have been somewhat more welcoming of disability as a valid topic of study, just as these fields preceded political science in realizing that gender was an important category of study. But political science has been slow to catch on.

On the face of it, there is considerable potential for productive dialogue between sociological institutionalism (SI) and institutionally oriented feminist political science (FPS). Both approaches employ broad conceptions of the political and its interconnection with the social: Each is concerned with the interaction between actors and institutions, broadly defined; the interplay between formal rules and informal practices, norms, and “ways of doing things”; and the consequent effects of these dynamics. Each approach takes a “value-critical” stance, sharing an understanding that seemingly neutral institutional processes and practices are, in fact, embedded in norms and cognitive frames, and in wider cultural contexts. In this short essay, we argue that SI provides one fruitful source for tools and paradigms beyond conventional political science (Lovenduski 1998; Mackay 2004), tools that may potentially enhance feminist analyses of key questions such as the following: How are institutions and institutional processes gendered? By what processes and mechanisms are institutions (re)produced and, in turn, reflect and reproduce social systems, including gender relations? How do institutions constrain actors and interests? And what is the gendered potential for, and what are the limits of, institutional innovation, reform, and change in pursuit of gender justice?

Invite a woman to run for office. Based on findings that women are most responsive to and reliant on encouragement in making the decision to run for office, this invitation refrain is pervasive among those seeking greater gender parity in U.S. politics. For example, in 2007, the Women's Campaign Fund launched She Should Run, complete with an online tool that, to date, has been used to ask just under 200,000 women to run for office. In 2014, another organization, Vote Run Lead, adopted a similar strategy, launching Invitation Nation to send e-invitations to run to nearly 10,000 women within their first year of launching the project. My own organization, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), has “invited” countless women to run for office through online communications, training programs, and recruitment campaigns and initiatives. While each of these organizations has also sought to provide potential women candidates with training, information, and resources to assist them throughout the recruitment process, our obsession with inviting can constrain a more complex and comprehensive approach to female candidate recruitment in both research and practice.

This article explores the dynamics of antigender mobilization in Poland and shows how gender equality projects are interconnected with the rise of opponents of “gender ideology.” It highlights material and discursive links between the local implementation of gender mainstreaming and the antigenderist backlash. The article points out that particular gender equality policies in non-Western settings result from Europeanization and thus are marked by a significant democratic deficit—that is, they are promoted without engaging a wider audience and elude parliamentary control. The study shows that if gender equality projects, such as gender mainstreaming, are fostered by external international commitments and obscure bureaucratic measures, they may unintentionally provide the impetus for antigender mobilization. Indeed, gender wars are fueled not only by controversies over gender and LGBT equality but also by growing concerns about citizens’ control over the state and its policies. The article is data based, and by employing framing analysis, it provides an explanation of the recent political success of antigenderist campaigns, which take place in a world of reconfigured states and diminishing democracies.

Candidate dropouts are a crucial and understudied population; they represent a significant source for increasing women's candidacies and addressing the gender imbalance in office. Survey evidence demonstrates that women are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is strong, while men are discouraged from running in districts in which their party is weak. Are women more likely to drop out of an election race than are men? If so, why? Using election records and an original survey, this article examines the experiences of all declared candidates for the state legislature in Florida in 2000 and 2002. The sample includes candidates who won office, who lost their races, or who dropped out along the way. Evidence here shows that women are no more likely to drop out of a state legislative race than are men. Among dropouts, however, women are disproportionately likely to drop out from districts in which their party is strong. The results offer support for the contention that political elites continue to value men's political leadership more than women's, and that increasing the number of female officeholders may require efforts to support declared women candidates in the earliest stages of their candidacies.A previous version of this research was presented as a paper at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. My thanks to Kira Sanbonmatsu for helpful comments on this study.

The connection between women leaders and superior pandemic performance is likely spurious. This narrative overlooks that women currently govern precisely the kinds of countries that should mount effective pandemic responses: wealthy democracies with high state capacity. This article maps where women currently serve as presidents and prime ministers. The article then uses data from the Varieties of Democracy Project and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to show that many women-led countries score high on state capacity and that high-capacity states have low coronavirus mortality regardless of whether they are led by women or by men. Arguments emphasizing women chief executives’ superior pandemic performance, while offered in good faith, are misleading.

In recent decades, scholars have documented remarkable changes in women's political representation around the world. At present, however, researchers are ill-equipped to explain these changes in women's representation in politics. In this article, we introduce a broad theoretical framework for reorienting existing explanations of women's formal political representation to account for change over time. We conceptualize stasis and growth in women's political representation as the balance between forces of resistance and forces for change. We also classify forces by timing, distinguishing among those that are continuous, are episodic, and have originated from critical periods. Using data on women in national legislatures from 1945 to 2003, we find that longitudinal forces combine to produce four common trajectories of women's political representation across time. We also discuss how various approaches, including event history analysis, latent growth curve models, and the focused ethnographic revisit, are well suited for modeling the different types of forces that combine to produce these trajectories. Overall, we argue that implementing a longitudinal framework for understanding women's political representation has the power both to alter the way we think about established findings and to suggest new theories for empirical evaluation.

What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies—48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005b). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of women's equality?